SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 30, 2013) - Appirio, a global cloud services provider, has announced the expansion of its team and new office in Japan, coupled with recent industry recognition and a growing number of customer wins. Established in 2008, Japan is home to Appirio's first office abroad. Since that time, Appirio has tripled its employee base in Japan and has recently moved to a larger Tokyo office better suiting its expanding team.

Appirio is also growing its crowdsourced development capabilities in the region through its recent acquisition of TopCoder. As a result, Appirio has created the world's largest professional development and design community of nearly 600,000 developers, designers and data analytics experts. About 9,100 Japanese developers participate in the community, with some participants representing the country's top universities like Tokyo University and Kyoto University.

Leading the new office is Jun Fujita, vice president and general manager of Appirio Japan. Fujita oversees team development, sales, marketing and customer support in the region. "We are proud to celebrate Appirio's growth and customer success in Japan," said Fujita. "Appirio is a Platinum Salesforce.com Cloud Alliance Partner, and has partnered with other cloud leaders both globally and throughout Japan. We have had the privilege of working on some of their most complex and impactful customer engagements."

Global analyst firm Forrester Research recognized Appirio as one of the most significant Salesforce implementation partners globally. The June 2013 report, "The Forrester Wave™: Salesforce.com Implementation Services, Q2 2013," evaluated the ten most significant Salesforce implementation partners against 45 criteria, which were grouped according to current offering, strategy and market presence. Appirio led the cloud specialists in the evaluation and received the highest current offering scores of those vendors in the strong performers category.

Appirio's Japanese team has a history of innovating on the leading cloud platforms including one of the largest Force.com deployments at Japan Post. Now the team is deploying Salesforce Communities at NEXT Co., Ltd., one of the largest real estate and housing information databases in Japan, with approximately 4.14 million property listings. Looking to improve communication and information sharing among real estate professionals, NEXT was able to create a social real estate community in less than three weeks.

"Our goal is to eliminate anxiety, dissatisfaction and inconvenience associated with the Japanese real-estate market, and providing people with a better way to share information and best practices," said Takashi Inoue, President & CEO at NEXT Co. Ltd. "We chose Salesforce Communities as the technology platform to help us actualize our idea, and Appirio to bring our innovation to life in a fast, high quality, impactful way."

About AppirioAppirio is a global services provider who uses crowdsourcing and cloud, social and mobile technology to help enterprises reimagine their business and become more agile. Appirio brings together technology expertise with a deep understanding of the way people work, and the development, design and analytics skills of a 600,000 person global crowdsourcing community. Appirio has worked with more than 500 enterprises, including organizations like Facebook, Intuit, Japan Post Network, L'Oreal, McGraw-Hill, NetApp, The Four Seasons, and Virgin America. The company is backed by Sequoia Capital, GGV Capital and General Atlantic.